Microsoft has just released RC1 of SQL Server 2016 and with it a number of SSRS enhancements. Here are a few of the key updates to reporting services – see this blog post for the full list of enhancements.

Web Portal Replaces Report Manager

Leveraging the DataZen technology the acquired, Microsoft has been working on a new modern HTML 5 based web portal for displaying dashboards and reports. It is now “feature complete” and replaces the old report manager.

One of the latest features in RC1 is search – you can enter in a query and be provided all the KPIs, reports and dashboards matching the search terms.

New Custom Branding

The new Web Portal can be branded to reflect your organization’s fonts, colours and logo.

Easy Embedding of Reports into other Apps

All reports are now embeddable through an IFrame – for example, in order to embed into a SharePoint page. You just add the rs:Embed=true query parameter to the end of the URL and it will strip away all of the SSRS chrome to make it optimized for inserting into another page.

Newly Modern Paginated Reports

SSRS reports no longer need to look like they were created in the mid-90s! Styling is now much easier and is now modern design by default.